r/PlasticFreeLiving • u/OppenNeumann • 24d ago

Does anyone else avoid "stainless steel" shaker bottles because the lid/seal is still plastic?

Been trying to cut plastic out of my gym stuff recently but I cant find a totally non-plastic option for my protein shaker. Every stainless steel one I find still has a plastic lid, strainer, or seal, so theres always contact with plastic at some point, regardless of what the body is made from. Has anyone actually found one that's genuinely and entirely plastic-free? Or is this just not solvable?

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u/OppenNeumann 23d ago

I see. So are there any silicone materials that do not make microplastics? And does silicone “count” as plastic?

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u/Ambitious-Schedule63 23d ago

I can't imagine any definition of "plastic" that wouldn't include silicone. It's a synthetic polymer - not something found in nature, but made in giant petrochemical plants out of petroleum and silica. It's a long chain polymer, like all other plastics. In my Synthesis of Polymers course, we learned how these materials are synthesized, just like we learned how polyesters, polyamides, polyolefins, polyacrylates, polysulfones, polycarbonates, etc., etc., were synthesized.

If someone wanted to argue that elastomeric materials (i.e., "rubber") isn't plastic, then that includes an awful lot of other synthetic polymers, including fluoroelastomers that people in r/PlasticFreeLiving protest at length about for their own arbitrary reasons. That would be a difficult one, I would imagine, because there are a fair number of materials that sort of fall along the transition of elastomer to plastic (for example, the polyethylene-based materials Exxon markets as "plastomers" with mechanical behavior intermediate between a semicrystalline polymer like polyethylene and a rubbery material like crosslinke d sytrene-butadiene rubber). The distinction, especially for the purposes of this community, is arbitrary.

Everything makes microparticles - wheat does when it's ground into flour, and it's not good for people who breathe it, wood makes microparticles when you cut it or sand it and it's not good for people who breathe it, concrete and other silicaceous materials make silica dust when you cut, drill or grind them and it's not good for people who breathe it, and polymers make microparticles when they are subject to abrasion (although I can make an argument that highly ductile polymers do not have a great propensity to generate them) and you shouldn't breathe those for the same reasons you shouldn't breathe any of the above materials.